News and Media Houses Are Using Web Push Notifications To Grow Their Traffic by 22%

Bundled up, smelling afresh, newspapers once were the routine tea partner for avid readers. Fast forward to 2020, I can best think of 5 friends that await the same old print smell every morning at 7.

That’s not to say people have abandoned print completely. But the following print once embraced in the early 2000s has diminished significantly and from the print circulation numbers Statista revealed, it will only go down in the years to come.

Many big newspaper chains have gone under the water. Starting from The Boston Globe, that lost its valuation by over 90% in early 2000, the two largest newspapers in Philadelphia also sold their assets in 2012 for $55 million after being invested with $515 million just six years ago. And now McClatchy, the biggest newspaper chain in the US, has filed for a bankruptcy in February 2020.

The way the audience consumes content has changed, making businesses in the news industry evolve rapidly over the last few years. First from print (subscribers) to digital (traffic) because that’s where the audience hangs out now. And then from digital (traffic) to digital (audience) in the wake of the algorithm updates of the dirty Duopoly.

Publishers need to explore more sophisticated marketing solutions that can help scale their audience acquisition numbers and promise its ownership from day 1.

Why News and Media Houses Use Web Push Notifications?

Web push notifications are interactive messages that work seamlessly across desktop (all OS) and mobile (only Android). It has a single click subscription where a permission prompt appears every time a user lands on the website that has enabled web push notifications. A user can either “Allow”, “Deny”, or “Dismiss” the prompt with a single click.

Supported by all the leading browsers including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, the adoption of web push notifications has been rapid among media publishers. Here are major reasons why publishers use web push notifications in 2020

6 Powerful Web Push Notification Use Cases For Publishers

Web push notifications (powered by iZooto) not only ensure an enhanced user engagement with a degree of personalization capabilities but also offer a comparatively higher click-through-rate. Here’s how News and Media industry can leverage web push as an audience engagement and ownership channel -

1. Real-time Event Updates

A channel that delivers quick, real-time updates on Match score and live events is a bliss to a news publisher. Such instances need a channel that enables publishers to engage their users in real time. Web push notifications are being used extensively by many leading publishers to achieve this.

Notifications cards are yet another fantastic feature of web push notifications that can be leveraged by the news and media houses while sending out real-time updates to their users. This ensures that your users don’t get annoyed with continuous notifications for these live updates by updating the same information with the new content.

2. Subscription Abandonment

Got users abandoning your newsletter subscription page? Don’t just redesign the landing page and embed sticky content in it. Over 67% of the users abandon a subscription page while 81% of these leave right at the beginning of the form.

With so many people landing on the page and not subscribing, we need more than just a kickass landing page. Bring this audience back by sending out a personalized notification. It not only acts as a perfect reminder but also shows that you as a brand care.

3. New Content Alert

Sending new content updates in real-time is one of the significant advantages of web push notifications. This makes it even more suitable for engaging users with the flash news and the breaking news. In such cases, emails and SMS fall short as these are entirely dependent on the user to open that email or SMS.

4. Recover Your Users' Abandoned Tabs

We live in a world where working on 15+ tabs is just another routine habit. But as frustrating as it is for the user navigating through those tabs, it is a headache for the publishers who have burnt the midnight oil to get more eyeballs on the content.

Web push notifications with a perfect mix of automation and personalization help you retain your subscribers by engaging them at the right time with the news they were interested in reading. iZooto has built a recover abanoned tabs playbook that sends out a contextual web push notification after a preset time, let’s say 1 minute, to the user that has just abandoned a website tab and enables publishers to recover their lost website sessions by up to 9%.

5. Recover Your Lost Video Watch Time

Last decade was all about mobile. But this one will certainly amount to COVID -19 and videos. “Watch Time”, defined as the time a user spends watching your video, is the new session duration for most of the media publishers today. But with over 87% of marketers using video content to engage their audience, watch time has taken a significant hit.

At iZooto we have combined our personalization and automation capabilities to design a playbook that helps publishers maximize their watch time by recovering some of their abandoned video sessions. The playbook enables you to retain your audience by engaging them at the right time with the videos they were already interested in. If you’re wondering how effective this playbook is, here are some fresh stats for you - publishers using the playbook have been able to increase their watch time by up to 6%.

6. A Life Long Revenue Stream

Push notification advertising is delivering a specific format of ad using a web push notification. These ads are delivered directly to the device of the user and hence don't occupy any ad unit on your website. Since you own the audience, you get to earn the ad revenue for a lifetime irrespective of the algorithm updates to follow. The ads are contextual and offer high visibility, therefore you get competitive CTRs.

After sending about 40 billion notifications every month and working with 15,000+ publisher businesses, iZooto has been helping publishers drive upto 22% traffic and 15% revenue lifts within 3 months of activation. Identified as the world’s first owned audience marketing platform, iZooto has been built as a solution to all the divisions working for publishers. Learn more about them here - iZooto for Editors; iZooto for Marketers; iZooto for Product Managers. But in order to see if iZooto is a right fit for your business and get a detailed analysis done by our product experts, create a free account today and book a demo.